A review by jeremyhornik
This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century by David Bowman
3.0
I used to love the Talking Heads so much. Then at some point I couldn't bear the pretensions. Then I would hear "Life During Wartime" and I would love them all over again. And I would also realize it was my own pretensions I hated. Me and the Talking Heads... it's complicated.
Anyways.
I realized recently that the Talking Heads were never ever getting back together, and I didn't know why. I imagined there must have been some reasons, and maybe some good, trashy stories. So I wanted to read a book, and this seemed like the best one.
It's not bad. It's kind of flatly written, and there's too much "That day the Challenger blew up" kind of stuff in it, and periodically it offers up some really stupid sentence that makes you wonder why you bothered, but generally it's all right. It tells the story, mostly a kind of musical tango between Byrne and Weymouth, who even as a teenager I knew were the coolest. All their best stuff came from the collaboration between the four of them. And when they couldn't collaborate anymore, the band was done.
There's a kind of magic in collaboration that makes art richer and stronger. But it has to be a real collaboration. If one person is leading with assistants, it loses something.
I guess what makes a great band is not the strengths of the members, but their flaws, and the willingness of the others to help shore them up in the service of the art. And as a group evolves, this gradually becomes unsustainable, as either success or failure will change the relative status of the different group members. Well, I'm glad they recorded it all. And I'm also glad I basically ignored all this history and just listened to the music for so long. There's a lot of cocaine and a lot of self-satisfaction but no major betrayals, no real trashiness. Just a collaboration that worked, until it didn't.
PS Someone's got to make Tina Weymouth into a movie character. She sounds like a... complicated and strong personality.
Anyways.
I realized recently that the Talking Heads were never ever getting back together, and I didn't know why. I imagined there must have been some reasons, and maybe some good, trashy stories. So I wanted to read a book, and this seemed like the best one.
It's not bad. It's kind of flatly written, and there's too much "That day the Challenger blew up" kind of stuff in it, and periodically it offers up some really stupid sentence that makes you wonder why you bothered, but generally it's all right. It tells the story, mostly a kind of musical tango between Byrne and Weymouth, who even as a teenager I knew were the coolest. All their best stuff came from the collaboration between the four of them. And when they couldn't collaborate anymore, the band was done.
There's a kind of magic in collaboration that makes art richer and stronger. But it has to be a real collaboration. If one person is leading with assistants, it loses something.
I guess what makes a great band is not the strengths of the members, but their flaws, and the willingness of the others to help shore them up in the service of the art. And as a group evolves, this gradually becomes unsustainable, as either success or failure will change the relative status of the different group members. Well, I'm glad they recorded it all. And I'm also glad I basically ignored all this history and just listened to the music for so long. There's a lot of cocaine and a lot of self-satisfaction but no major betrayals, no real trashiness. Just a collaboration that worked, until it didn't.
PS Someone's got to make Tina Weymouth into a movie character. She sounds like a... complicated and strong personality.